Nicolaas Bloembergen

Nicolaas Bloembergen
(1920)

Dutch-born American physicist, corecipient with Arthur Leonard Schawlow
of the United States and Kai Manne Borje Siegbahn of Sweden of the 1981
Nobel Prize for Physics for their revolutionary spectroscopic studies
of the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter. Bloembergen
made a pioneering use of lasers in these investigations.
Bloembergen received undergraduate (1941) and graduate (1943) degrees
from the University of Utrecht. In 1946 he entered Harvard University,
where with Edward Purcell and Robert Pound he did fundamental research
on nuclear magnetic resonance. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University
of Leiden in 1948, he returned to Harvard, where he became a professor
of applied physics in 1951 and Gerhard Gade university professor in
1980. He became a U.S. citizen in 1958.

Bloembergen's early research on nuclear magnetic resonance led him
to an interest in masers. He designed a three-stage crystal maser that
was dramatically more powerful than earlier gaseous masers and that
has become the most widely used microwave amplifier. Bloembergen then
developed laser spectroscopy, which allows high-precision observations
of atomic structure. His laser spectroscopic investigations led him
in turn to formulate nonlinear optics, a new theoretical approach to
the analysis of how electromagnetic radiation interacts with matter.
Bloembergen's research in nonlinear optics helped procure him a share
of the Nobel Prize.